Seating Arrangements Read Online Free PDF Page A

on.”
    Winn stared at her. She looked back at him and fingered one of the strands of plastic beads that garlanded her neck. Somehow in her infancy she had absorbed a set of phrases and mannerisms that Biddycalled breezy and Winn called absurd but that, in any event, had her swanning through preschool like an aging socialite. They left her once with Biddy’s eldest sister, Tabitha, and went to Turks and Caicos for a week, hoping Tabitha’s son Dryden would get her to dirty her knees a little. Instead, they returned to find Dryden draped in baubles and Daphne arranging clips in his hair.
    “Dryden,” Biddy said, “you look awfully dressed up for this time of day.”
    The boy released a sigh of weary sophistication. He fluttered his blue-dusted eyelids and spread his fingers against his chest. “Oh, this? This is nothing. The good stuff’s in the safe.”
    To Winn, Daphne was a foreign being, a sort of mystic, a snake charmer or a charismatic preacher, an ambassador from a distant frontier of experience. The academic knowledge that she was the product of his body was not enough to forge a true belief; he felt no instantaneous, involuntary recognition of her as flesh and blood. Not for lack of trying, either. He had changed her diapers and held her while she cried in the night and spooned gloopy food into her mouth, and certainly he loved her, but she only became more and more strange to him as she got older, and his love for her gave him no comfort but instead made him alarmingly porous, full of hidden passageways that let in feelings of yearning and exclusion. Sitting behind the paper, he imagined with trepidation a house populated by two Daphnes, a Biddy, and only one Winn.
    “Daddy,” came the piping voice from across the table, “am I a princess?”
    “No,” Winn said. “You’re a very nice little girl.”
    “Will I be a princess someday?”
    Winn bent the top of the newspaper down and looked over it. “It depends on whom you marry.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Well, there are two ways for a woman to become a princess. Either she’s born one, or she marries a prince or, I think, a grand duke—although I’m not sure those exist anymore. You see, Daphne, manycountries that used to have princesses don’t anymore because they’ve abolished their monarchies, and an aristocracy doesn’t make sense without a monarchy. Austria, for example, got rid of all that business after the First World War. Hereditary systems like that aren’t fair, you see, and they breed resentment among the lower classes. Anyway, the long and short of it is, since you weren’t born a princess, you would need to marry a prince, and there aren’t very many of those around.”
    Reproachfully, she ate a grape and then wiped her fingers one at a time on a napkin. He returned to reading.
    “Daddy.”
    “What?”
    “Am I your princess?”
    “Christ, Daphne.”
    “What?”
    “You sound like a kid on TV.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’re full of treacle.”
    “What’s treacle?”
    “Something that’s too sweet. It gives you a stomachache.”
    She nodded, accepting this. “But,” she pressed on, “am I your princess?”
    “To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any princesses. What I do have is a little girl without any dignity.”
    “What’s dignity?”
    “Dignity is behaving the way you’re supposed to so people respect you.”
    “Do princesses have dignity?”
    “Some do.”
    “Which ones?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe Grace Kelly.”
    “Who is she?”
    “She was a princess. First she was an actress. Then she married a prince and became a princess. In Monaco. She was killed in a car accident.”
    “What’s Monaco?”
    “A place in Europe.”
    Daphne took a moment to absorb and then asked, “Am I your princess?”
    “We’ve just been through this,” Winn said, exasperated.
    She looked like she was trying to decide whether her interests would be better served by smiling or crying. “I want to be your